Hierarchically organized data or other structures are commonly represented in a display image by a tree-like organization of icons representing corresponding data elements of the hierarchical data structure. Further it is common to present such a hierarchical data structure representation in a first window of a composite image with the contents (or another attribute or property) of a currently selected item of the first window being displayed in a second window of the composite image. Such hierarchical data structure representations may be used for a multitude of purposes including, for example, selecting properties and attributes of software objects employed by an executable procedure to determine the function performed by the procedure. However, known systems have a number of limitations and deficiencies limiting user ability to select items and manipulate items in a hierarchical data structure representation and to navigate the data structure representation. Specifically, known systems typically require substantial manual effort to create new parent data elements and subset elements in a data hierarchy. Further, known systems lack user friendly interfaces and have limited capability for sorting, filtering, copying and deleting particular data elements and categories of data elements in a data hierarchy. A system according to invention principles addresses these deficiencies and derivative problems.